We've arrived at something of a definition of the "Southeast."

Lew Powell argued the term was a Yankee invention, which John Shelton Reed backed up. The Census Bureau was no help, giving us "East South Central" and "South Atlantic" regions that might be useful if they didn't stupidly include Delaware and Maryland.

College football pushed for the inclusion of Louisiana and Arkansas, as did the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Neither liked oddball West Virginia but Kentucky didn't fit anywhere else either and it was generally accepted.

Even Wikipedia found 15 different lists. 

One reader suggested "The Confederate states minus Texas" which agrees with most of the other lists, but does not include either Kentucky or West Virginia. 

Dome sees basically two definitions: 

Lesser Southeast: The former Confederate states east of the Mississippi: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Add Kentucky because aside from the Cincinnati suburbs it wouldn't fit in the North.

Greater Southeast: All those states plus the three borderline cases of West Virginia, Arkansas and Louisiana. 

Here's the rub. The states that have high tax burdens along with North Carolina are West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas and Kentucky.

So the "highest taxes in the Southeast" claim is going to depend entirely on whether you accept the broader or narrower definition of the region.

The U.S. Census Bureau does not define the Southeast.

Still, it does define the "East South Central" and "South Atlantic" regions.

The "East South Central" region includes Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. The "South Atlantic" includes Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Washington, D.C.

That means that the Census Bureau roughly endorses the division of Southeast and Southwest using the Mississippi River, but it uses the older, outmoded definition of the South using the Mason-Dixon line below Pennsylvania.

Other than Johnny Cash, few people consider Maryland, Delaware and D.C. to be Southern.

Retired UNC-Chapel Hill professor John Shelton Reed said the Census Bureau periodically considers cutting Maryland and Delaware out of its Southern classification, but it has so far ended up sticking with it simply because that's how it's always been done.

Lew Powell argued in 1985 that the South had vanished.

The culprits come from points North. Where Yankees in blue uniforms failed — in wiping out the South — Yankees in blue Hickey Freemans have now succeeded.

"When I mention the South to these people," says UNCC geographer Al Stuart, "they get a funny little expression on their face. They don't know what I'm talking about. I immediately have to qualify it as the Southeastern United States."

The Charlotte Observer editor wrote that it was "just a matter of time until Charlotteans speak with Southeastern accents, eat Southeastern fried chicken, offer our guests Southeastern hospitality."

The complete essay after the jump.

Hat Tip: Lamara Williams

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Is the "Southeast" a Yankee creation?

In a noted essay in the Charlotte Observer in the early 1980s, editor Lew Powell suggested that the use of the term "Southeastern" was an attempt by Northern transplants to re-identify their new surroundings.

Now retired UNC-Chapel Hill professor John Shelton Reed responded to the article in a piece (under the pseudonym J.R. Vanover) for Southern Partisan magazine that attacked the term as a historical dodge (quoted here):

... I am afraid that, increasingly, Southeast is not being used to designate a part of the South, the eastern counterpart of the Southwest. Rather it refers to a major region of the United States — a counterpart to, say, the Northeast. There is a disturbing tendency in these parts to say and to write and even, God help us, to think Southeastern, where formerly we would have said and written and thought Southern.

In a scholarly paper in 1990, Reed and two co-authors found that use of the terms "the South" and "Dixie" had dropped in city phone books over the past two decades.

John Shelton Reed says the Southeast is a concept, not a region.

The retired UNC-Chapel Hill sociology professor said that the Southeastern United States is a loosely defined "post-historical region" centered around Atlanta.

"It's an economy; it's not a culture," he said. "You talk about Southern music and Southern cooking and Southern women. You don't talk about Southeastern music and cooking and women."

As a general rule, Reed said the boundaries do not necessarily follow state borders, but he would use the Mississippi River as the dividing line between the Southeast and the Southwest and the usual borders between the North and South.

That would include: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

It would leave out Arkansas and Louisiana. He said West Virginia would be a borderline case.

"These boundaries are kind of indistinct," he said. "You don't cross a border, you sort of move into it gradually."

Hat Tip: awbeal